Foreword
After the day’s visits in Tampere and Kangasala we made the last stop
in Hämeenlinna, at TL-Audio. Since my previous visit Tapani Lappi had finished
his burning-in process for the Sound Lab Majestic 845 speakers, had bettered
their placing and the front end of the system. The system had also updated Transparent
Reference XL MM2 series cabling. So, it was the time to check out what had achieved
and what kind of listening results the system would deliver now.

Sound
At the beginning of the session Tapani played couple of impressive live CDs
from wide genre of music. They sounded great and delivered really live-like
atmosphere. It was not hard at all to notice several features being at the top.
Music sounded very, very coherent and had excellent speed, transparency and
clarity. Naturally this made most of instruments to be exceptionally natural
sounding. For example cymbals and hi-hats sounded even surprisingly great. Vocals
and midrange instruments settled also exceptionally well on the other bands.
The bass was quite interesting and exiting. It seemed to be the best what I
had heard from electrostatic or magnetostatic speakers. It was very powerful
and fast. It might even have a snappy nature. The sonic picture was very good
but did not quite achieve the best levels what I have heard. In my opinion TL-Audio’s
Acapella Triolon Excalibur set-up, couple of Wilson set-ups and my friend’s
Burmester B-100 set-up had reached slightly better results. Still on the whole
the soundstaging features seemed to be impressive enough. So, the burning-in
process and bettered front end and speaker placing seemed to effect quite a
lot to the listening results, once again!

After the first session
we made a deeper evaluation with my test CDs, but nothing very new notifications
were done. The over-all sound was simply excellent and easily delivered the
best sound of the day. My feelings reminded a lot what I typically had experienced
during the sessions of other reference set-ups. Only the nature of bass, the
abilities to deliver micro details and reverberation effects got some more light.
The bass had really some kind of panel-like and slightly snappy nature. It just
could not reach the last bits of punch, power and tone colours what couple of
traditional reference speakers had delivered for me. Please don’t get
me wrong here! Still the bass had clearly better speed, control and dynamics
than what for example Magneplanar MG 20.1 had delivered. So, on the whole, the
bass was still excellent. We got further information from micro details as well.
This set-up delivered marvellous amount of low level details. I have experienced
this kind of deep view for low level information only in couple of cases, especially
in my listening room. At least my current set-up with more monitor-like speaker
placing is still a tad ahead in this manner.

Conclusion
Tapani Lappi did it again! He had constructed a new system into reference class.
As we know, Tapani likes a big sound, and this set-up delivered it, especially
vertically. The sound was also very impressive, clean and natural. Some tiny
cons were noticed, but those did not matter much in over-all evaluation, at
least for me. The new Burmester front end and Transparent’s cabling seemed
to work marvellously. But especially if you are going to have new loudspeakers
from 30 kilo euros price class, Sound Lab Majestic 845 should be on the list
as an alternative. Go and get your own listening experiences!